Former talk show host Rosie O’Donnell spoke out to defend Ellen DeGeneres this week amidst the comedian’s toxic workplace scandal that has exploded over the past month.

O’Donnell, who hosted her own daytime talk show from 1996-2002, admitted that she feels “compassion” for DeGeneres.

“You can’t fake your essence,” O’Donnell said on the podcast “Busy Philipps Is Doing Her Best.”

“That’s why I have compassion for Ellen [DeGeneres], right?” she continued. “I have compassion, even though, you know, I hear the stories and I understand. I think she has some social awkwardness.”

This comes after dozens of current and former employees came forward to accuse DeGeneres of turning a blind eye to racism, intimidation, and sexual misconduct on the set of her show.

O’Donnell went on to admit that she’d never actually been a guest on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” for one reason.

“You know how Ellen surprises everyone?” she said, “I’ve never done that show because I’m terrified she’s going to scare me and give me a heart attack.”

O’Donnell also explained that she’d wanted to have her own talk show because of her growing family. Being able to do a daytime talk show instead of working grueling hours on movie sets allowed her to spend more time with her children.

“I had to get a nanny, because I hadn’t had a nanny till then and he was like, you know, 8, 9 months old,” she said, referring to her son. “So I got my [housekeeper], Maria, to come with me to the movie set to help take care of him, and when I came home after, like, the second day of 12 hours, he wouldn’t come to me. He was staying with Maria… And I thought, I need a job where he can grow up with his cousins and his family around him, where I’m going to be there every day to take him to school.”

O’Donnell eventually ended her show after having four children under the age of six, adding that she found the experience of hosting to be “trippy.”

“[Hosting] wasn’t like anything close to real life,” O’Donnell recalled. “You know, you get mass adulation from the multitudes every day like a shot of heroin in your arm. You get people clapping at your very existence and then telling you how you altered their life, and it’s a lot to take in. And when I stepped away, I knew that this was all I could take.”